Saturday, June 17, 2006

John Seely-Brown

I guess a lot of my thinking has been more influenced by "interesting" approaches to the problems of business than by what is being scribbled in various educational discourses. In my head the Web2 stuff is a harbinger for or maybe an accelerator of increasingly serious challenges to authority claims around knowledge that have largely resided in the academy. This is a very long intro to merely point to an intriguing podcast by John Seely-Brown who has the wonderful title of "Chief of Confusion. He was Chief Scientist at Xerox-Parc for a long time. Did a lot of interesting work in relation to situated cognition. But this piece is, I think, germane to KPS-style thinking.

"Perspective: Distributed Business," by John Seely Brown, from Supernova 2005, June 2005.

As a footnote, I have begun to make a lot more use of podcasts courtesy of an iPod with FM radio transmitter attached to it so during all the driving I do, I can listen to neat stuff like this.